


where the moments move so slow (and seem to never let you go)

by brahe



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DCU, Justice League (2017), Justice League - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anemoia, Emotions, Light Angst, M/M, No Proofreading We Die Like Men, Post-Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Timeline? Don't know her, bruce is a good dad (TM), emotions and martha and bruce bonding, idk it's kind of minimalist?, it's p much all emotion with a side of plot, that's p much it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 17:26:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15272565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brahe/pseuds/brahe
Summary: “Clark hated the spring,” Martha tells him. “The smell was always too much for him, he said. The smell and the pollen.”Bruce hums, lets himself think about Superman with allergies, and that – that’s what he missed, the first time around, the long, long list of things that made Clark Kent one of the mosthumanof them all.Or,Bruce and Martha, after.





	where the moments move so slow (and seem to never let you go)

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  _i wasn't yours and you weren't mine_   
>  _though i'd wished from time to time_   
>  _we had found a common ground your_   
>  _voice was such a welcome sound_   
> 

The first four times he goes to Kansas, it’s raining – the days are dim, the sun covered by thick grey clouds that stretch on and on and on until they touch the far horizon, rain intermittent but frequent.

 

“My boy’s gone and took the sun with him,” Martha says the second time Bruce goes to see her, the two of them sitting in the living room with the curtains thrown open. Bruce is surprised by how steady her voice sounds, but when he looks at her, her brows are drawn and her eyes shine in the low light. It starts to rain not long after that.

\--

The seventh time he goes, he pulls into the Kent driveway to the not-quite-yet familiar sight of the house and the forest behind it, dark against a darker sky. Martha ushers him inside, and she already has a cup of his prefered tea brewed and sitting on the counter, at the perfect temperature to drink.

Today they sit outside, on the rocking chairs on the back porch, and it’s silent for a while. There’s a mist rising off the woods – it rained a few hours before Bruce arrived.

“How are you?” Martha asks him after a while, and Bruce knows she doesn’t mean –

“I could ask you the same question,” he says, raising an eyebrow at her, and her answering laugh sounds tired.

“I’m doing okay, I think,” she tells him, sitting back in her chair and looking up at the clouds. “It’s almost time to start planting, and I – I’m a little worried about the season, this year,” she admits, and then, “I miss the sun,” she adds, and there’s a hitch in her breath and when Bruce glances at her she’s hunched over a little, elbows on her legs and hand over her mouth, and her voice is rough, ragged, when she says, “I miss my son.”

Bruce offers her a hand, and hers is cool and calloused in his, and she squeezes tightly. For the first time, Bruce thinks about telling someone about Jason.

“No parent should ever have to bury their child,” he says, quiet, and his voice is thick. Martha looks at him, but she doesn’t question him, not now, anyway. He’s sure she’s filed it away, with all the other things he’s told her: how he had convinced himself that he needed to kill her son, how he had spent years of his life trying to save his city with his fists, how so much of his life has become an act. She’s the easiest person to talk to that he’s ever met.

\--

The twelfth time he comes, there’s snow on the ground. It’s December.

He knocks once and walks in, as Martha’s encouraged him to do. He finds her in the kitchen, a storage box on the table. She’s got a stocking clutched in her hand, and she’s crying.

Bruce rests his hand on hers and she startles, looks wide-eyed until she sees it’s him, and then she’s pulling him into a hug, and he stands there and holds her until she pulls away, wiping at her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be.” Bruce sees the rest of the Christmas decorations in the box, and, when Martha’s turned towards the counter to fix some cocoa, he says, “Why don’t you come to the Manor for Christmas?”

She turns to look at him, and she’s silent for a while as the water heats. “I know the kids would love to meet you,” he adds, and she blinks at him, shocked.

“Kids? How come you never told me you had kids?” she asks, sounded offended. Bruce shrugs.

“It’s not about me,” he tells her, and she scoffs.

She hands him a mug of cocoa and studies him. “How many?”

“Five,” he says, “officially.”

She laughs, a short, surprised sound. “Lord bless you.”

They sip their cocoa in silence as she studies him more.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks, and he could pretend not to know what she’s talking about, but he wouldn’t do that to her. Couldn’t.

He thinks back to that day on the back porch, about what he said, about Jason.

“I know,” he starts, and then stops, shifting before he tries again. “I know what it’s like,” he tells her. “To lose a child. To bury one.”

She puts her mug on the counter, murmurs something that sounds like his name, and pulls him into another hug, tight and comforting. Neither says anything when Bruce wraps his arms around her waist, hands clutched in the fabric her shirt, and lets himself cry.

\--

He comes back less than a week later, the snow thicker and the sky still grey. They sit in the living room, legs pressed together, an old scrapbook open between them. Martha's sniffling a little as she flips through the pages, and each photograph comes with a story.

She laughs a little to herself when she turns the next page, fingers light as they trace the figures in the picture. It's Clark and his father standing behind a baking soda volcano, the words _science fair_ big and bold on the wall behind them.

“He was so smart,” she tells Bruce. “He used to read things like Plato for fun, in elementary school.” When Bruce looks at her, surprised, there's a soft, wistful smile on her face. “This was the first science fair he ever did. It was one of the few things Jonathan let him do without – worrying. He came home from that fair saying his experiment was too easy,” she says, laugh light. “Every year after that was something more dramatic.”

Bruce can't help thinking about Jason – Jason, who would disappear for a day with a book, who had started to make his way through every one in the Manor’s library.

“Jason loved to read,” he finds himself saying. “He loved the classics, too.”

He can feel Martha's eyes on him, and he feels bad for making this about himself, for taking it away from her, but she just tucks a piece of his hair behind his ear, finds his hand with hers.

“Jason,” she repeats, and Bruce realizes he's never told her his name. He nods, feels numb.

“Did Clark know?” Martha asks, and Bruce looks at her. “About your kids?”

It almost startles a laugh out of him, a harsh, deprecating sound. Of course Clark didn't know; they didn't know anything about each other at all.

“No,” Bruce says, and Martha hums, and Bruce suddenly can't help imagining it –

Clark in his doorway, offering him a smile that gets softer when he sees the little heads poking around the door; Clark laughing as Dick gapes at him, star-struck even after the years; Clark staying over for dinner, stuck between a bickering Tim and Damian and throwing Bruce a grin across the table; Clark in his house, in his kitchen, in his _life_ – and it feels right in a way that makes him feel sick, because he doesn't deserve that. That isn't his to have, but he can't help the way he wants it, the way it cuts into his heart like a knife, quick and true.

“Bruce?” Martha says, like she's said it a few times, and he blinks at her. Her smile is soft.

“He always loved talking to kids,” Martha tells him. “I think he would have enjoyed meeting yours.”

Bruce blinks hard, and he's surprised to find his eyes burning. “I would've liked that,” he admits, and his guilt is like water rising up around him, threatening to drown.

 

They move back to the scrapbook, the plastic crinkling as Martha slowly turns through the pages. The next one falls open and there's a picture of Clark, no more than ten years old, standing in front of the clothesline with a red sheet around his neck, hands on his hips and face towards the sky. Bruce can't take his eyes off of it, and there's too many thoughts swirling around his head to make sense of any of them.

“He loved running around with that sheet,” Martha says. “‘Playing hero,’ he called it.”

Bruce closes his eyes, and the child in the image ages twenty years, the t-shirt and jeans faded into alien blue fabric.

“I remember taking this photograph. It was finally starting to cool off, and we were all outside. I passed Jonathan on the way into the house to get the camera. He was standing by the washbucket, just lookin’ at Clark. ‘He's going to change the world,’ he told me, and I – John said that a lot about our son, but there was something about that time, watching Clark stand there in the cape, sunlight silhouetting his hair.” Martha rubs her thumb against the picture. “Something real. Something special.”

 

Bruce is standing in the doorway, wrapping his scarf around his neck, when Martha leans against the wall and tells him she'll come to Gotham for Christmas.

 

He calls Alfred on the road to tell him they’ll need one more plate.

\--

“They’re all foster kids,” Bruce tells her on the plane to Gotham. “Except for Damian, but his mother and I – we’re both better without her.”

“I figured as much,” Martha says, but doesn’t offer how. She squeezes Bruce’s arm. “They’re still your kids, no matter where they came from.”

And Bruce thinks he should have expected that from her, from the woman who took in and protected and raised a child that fell out of the sky.

“I wish I – you and Clark. You did such a good job, he loved you so much.” Bruce lets his eyes close. “I haven’t been as graceful.”

Martha tuts at him. “Do you have a picture of them?” she asks, and Bruce fishes out his wallet, pulling out a photograph that’s a couple years old. Alfred took it – they’re all there by the pool in the middle of the summer, and the picture makes Bruce’s heart ache, sometimes.

Martha looks at the picture in her hands with a smile. “I’m sure that no matter what they say, at the end of the day, all those kids love you.”

Bruce huffs. “That’s an old picture,” he says. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“I am,” Martha tells him, and hands the picture back to him.

\--

Dinner dissolves into game night, a loud, raucous game of _Catch Phrase,_  and Bruce could spend the rest of his days like this, he thinks. He finds himself wondering if Clark would've liked this, sitting around playing guessing games until late into the night.

He finds Martha's eye and gives her a smile.

“What do you think?” he asks her, quietly, between rounds. She's been grinning all night, blending seamlessly into Bruce's family.

She reaches for Bruce's hand. “Thank you, for inviting me,” she says, then looks around the table. “A full house, it's – it's nice.”

Bruce squeezes her hand. “I'm glad you came,” he says, means it earnestly. Then, “Do you think…”

Martha's answering smile is soft, weary a little at the edges. “Yes,” she tells him. “He would've loved this.”

 

The game resumes, and Bruce catches Alfred's eye from across the table, shrugs in response to his questioning eyebrow.

 

Bruce walks her to the guest bedroom later, and he stands in the doorway as she walks around.

“Do you need anything else?” he asks, and she comes back around to him, shaking her head.

“Thank you,” she says. “I – it feels like it's been a long time since I've had a family dinner.”

Bruce can feel his face soften, and he wraps Martha into a hug.

“You're always welcome here,” he tells her, and it's fierce in its truthfulness. He doesn't want to presume, doesn't want to overstep, but – “It feels like you're family, anyway,” he says, and when she pulls back to look at him, her eyes are shining.

She rests a hand on his cheek, and he can't read her face, but he figures that's alright.

“Thank you, Bruce,” she says again, and for the first time he feels like he's doing right by Clark, by the promise he made.

\--

The eighteenth time he visits is the first time he sees the sun in Kansas. It's late February – the sun is a cold, winter one, but it's the sun nonetheless. He steps off the plane and into a foreign, unfounded kind of hope, and he curses himself and his foolish thoughts when he looks to the sky and sees nothing but light blue and white.

 

Martha is outside when he arrives, tending to the plants by the porch that the melted snow has exposed. She looks over when his car turns up the gravel driveway, offers him a smile.

He looks around when he steps out of the car, at the brown, rolling fields, the house and its peeling white paint, the wispy clouds in a pale blue sky. It's picturesque, postcard Midwestern America, and when he turns around there is again that foolish expectation to see Clark, standing there with his glasses off, curls shifting in the breeze, plaid button down open to the cool air.

“It’s beautiful,” he tells Martha. She shrugs.  
“It’s home.”

 

He follows her around the house, today, insists on helping her with the chores. They do the dishes to the tune of idle chatting, and Bruce helps her carry a basket out to the clothesline. He takes a seat, then, keeps her company as she makes her way through the laundry.

“You know, Bruce,” she says from behind a bedsheet, “you keep surprising me.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow at her when she looks around the sheet to him. “In good ways, I hope,” he says, and she laughs, returns to clothesline.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect from you, that first day. Or those first few visits, either,” she tells him. “But I’ve come to really enjoy your visits. You’re rather handy to have around,” she smiles.

Bruce laughs. “You know I’m always happy to come, and happy to help.”

Martha hums, and they lapse into silence for a while, until she's nearly finished with the laundry.

“I keep thinking about you and Clark,” she says, and Bruce can’t help the way he tenses at that, can’t help the flood of emotions that war with each other. “I think you would’ve got on so well, once you understood each other.”

“I don’t know about that,” Bruce says, and he sounds dejected even to himself. Martha tsks.

“I know my boy,” she tells him. “And I think I know you pretty well, too. You’d’ve complimented each other well.”

Bruce swallows. “I keep looking at the sky,” he admits, “thinking…” He stops, shakes his head and sighs. “I don't know what I'm thinking.”

It's ridiculous, he tells himself, when he catches his eyes on the sky again. Clark's six feet underground because of Bruce's own misguided thoughts, and he's staying that way.

That doesn't make it hurt any less.

Martha looks up at the sky, too. “You’re allowed to mourn, you know,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how well you knew him, or what happened.” When she looks to Bruce, he feels like she looks right through him. “Feelings are fickle things. They hardly do what we want them to do.”

\--

The twenty-fourth time he visits the farm, it’s early spring, and he’s brought Dick and Damian with him.

Martha pulls his boys into tight hugs, and Dick’s smiling at her, bright in the midwestern sun. Bruce has to remind himself sometimes that this is real, that Dick’s come back to him, forgiven him for all the mistakes he made.

 

“We’re here to help with the planting,” Dick tells her, when they’re all sitting on the grass out front, soaking up the sunshine.

“Father said it would be a good exercise,” Damian adds, and Martha laughs, ruffling his hair. She’s one of four people he’ll let touch him so casually, and when Martha catches Bruce’s eye with a smile, he can’t help but give her one in return.

“Well,” she says. “I won’t turn down help from such capable young men. Come with me,” she says, standing. “I’ll show you what to do.”

Bruce watches the three of them until they’ve disappeared into the barn, and then he looks up at the sky, squinting against the sun, and for the first time it hits him, hard enough that his eyes sting briefly. Clark should be here, he thinks, and he surprises himself with how much the thought makes him ache.

\--

Bruce has stopped counting how many times he’s gone to Kansas, now, and this time he brings Jason and Dick and a trunk load of paint cans.

“Why couldn't you have just hired people for this?” Jason asks him on the way from the airport, and Bruce looks at him from the corner of his eye, the way he's slouched in the passenger seat staring out the window and pretending like he doesn't want to be here.

“It didn't feel right,” Bruce tells him, and he feels the shock in Jason's expression without having to see it.

“Damn, Kansas _has_ turned you soft,” he says, though it's lacking the heat Bruce had expected.

 

Martha greets his eldests with warm hugs and kisses to both cheeks, and then Bruce sends them back to the car.

“I don't want to impose,” Bruce starts, and Martha raises an eyebrow at him. Bruce huffs and tells her, blunt. “The outside of the house has seen better days. Let me paint it.”

Martha blinks at him. “You want to paint the house?” she repeats, and Bruce nods.

“Let me – it's the least I can do.”

“The least?” Martha says, incredulous, and chokes on a sound. “Bruce, I don't…the least you could do is far less than anything you've done. You've come to visit me at least twice a month, you had me over for Christmas, you brought your boys to help with the farm, I…” She trails off, looks out the big bay window at Jason and Dick, who've piled the paint cans outside the car trunk.

Bruce watches as her shoulders settle. “It'll take you more than a day,” she says. “Let me put you up in the guest room.” She turns to face him as if she can sense his protest. “You're not allowed to say no.”

 

They get a whole side of the house done by sundown, fueled by Martha's snacks and refreshments. It's nice, Bruce thinks, relaxing. Dick and Jason rib each other endlessly, and Bruce can't get enough of the sounds of their laughter, easy and genuine.

He loses himself, sometimes, in the repetitive movements of the brush on paneling, lets his thoughts drift to Clark as they've been wont to do as of late. Clark and his wide smile Bruce has only seen in photographs, Clark and his collection of used books and well-worn plaids. Clark in the afternoon sun, tanned skin glowing in the warm light; Clark with his hair loose, curling around his face and on the back of his neck. Clark and the way he'd be able to make Bruce laugh, the way he'd push him to work harder. Clark and the way his skin would feel, soft and smooth and radiating warmth; Clark and the way his hair would feel slipping between Bruce's fingers.

 

Martha makes them dinner, steak and potatoes and grilled vegetables, and Bruce catches the way she warms at a full table, sits back to enjoy the way she questions his boys, chats easily with them. Jason's warmed up to this whole trip, face more open and expressive than Bruce has seen in what feels like a lifetime.

Dick offers to clean up when they're done and drags Jason along with him, leaving Bruce and Martha with their cups of coffee on the porch, watching the sunset.

“Jason is a sweet boy,” she tells Bruce, after some time. “He has his problems, I know, but…” She turns, reaches out for Bruce's hand and squeezes. “I'm so happy you got him back. Happy for the both of you.”

Bruce keeps his hand in hers as she looks back to the darkening sky, and for a moment he can't help but feel that it's unfair, that Jason's been returned to him and Martha still sits here with her son underground.

“Thank you, for all of this,” Bruce tells her. “I know it's…we needed this.” From inside, he can hear the sounds of a water fight. “They needed this.”

Martha hums. “Love is the only thing you can keep forever,” she says. “Love and memories.”

\--

The air smells like flowers when Bruce comes up the driveway. There’s daffodils on either side of the gravel, and the porch is lined with white bleeding hearts. Martha joins him outside with two glasses of lemonade.

“Clark hated the spring,” Martha tells him. “The smell was always too much for him, he said. The smell and the pollen.”

Bruce hums, lets himself think about Superman with allergies, and that – that’s what he missed, the first time around, the long, long list of things that made Clark Kent one of the most _human_ of them all.

“How are you doing, with your boys?” Martha asks him, and Bruce smiles.

“They’re – we’re good. Better than we’ve been in a long time.”

Martha nods. “I want you all out here for dinner sometime,” she tells Bruce. “When the weather gets a little warmer. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a full table.”

“They love coming to see you,” he says. “Just name the day.”

“They did such good work in the fields and on the house,” she says. “So quick, too.” There's a pause as she looks at the horizon. “Clark would always come back to help with the planting,” she says. “He told me once he liked how repetitive it was. Said it was nice to take a day and forget about everything else.”

“I wish, – ” Bruce starts, then bites his tongue. “I’m sorry,” he says instead, and maybe he’s said it a dozen times already, but the more time he spends with Martha, the more times he knows no number of apologies will ever be enough.

“I told you, enough of that,” Martha says, and her voice is firm but soft. “It wasn’t your fault, and I know Clark would agree with me.”

 _I miss him_ , Bruce suddenly wants to say. _I wish I got to know him better, while I had the chance._ He blinks hard at the empty blue sky, and wonders when he’d grown so attached to the ghost of the man he’d try to kill.

\--

He comes again late in May, the Kansas summer sun as unrelenting as it is refreshing. Bruce is out by the barn, wiping off oil from the tractor’s engine. Martha comes to find him in the late afternoon, brings him a tall glass of iced water.

“Clark loved getting his hands into that thing, too,” she says with a laugh. “You two would've been such good friends.”

Bruce shakes his head.

“I hardly knew him,” he reminds her, and that might have been true, once, but now – _now,_ present tense, he feels like he knows Clark. He knows how Clark liked his coffee, how Clark was in the chess club and the drama club and beta club, how Clark loved standing out in the fields in the middle of the night, how Clark felt responsible for his father's death, how Clark hated buying new shirts because of the way the fabric itched against his skin. Somewhere along the line he'd lost track of himself, and now he finds himself here, trying to right a wrong by getting to know the memory of the man, of Clark, of –

Maybe it’s the sun, warm and comforting against his back; maybe it’s the way the farm always makes him want to open up; maybe it’s the way Martha’s looking at him, soft and knowing; maybe it's the way he's been headed to this destination since the beginning without even realizing it.

“I think I – ” Bruce starts, tongue tied on the words, and he looks up at the sky. “I think I would have loved him,” he admits, quiet, like a confession. “If I had the chance. If I didn’t – ”

Saying it out loud simultaneously feels like a weight lifted off his shoulders and a sucker punch to his heart. Martha pulls him into a hug.

“Yes,” Martha says over his shoulder. “I think he would have, too.”

\--

He nearly crashes the car twice on the way to the farm, he's so distracted. He thinks his hands would be shaking if they weren't white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and he can't stop playing Martha's words in his head over and over like a broken record. If he hadn't been to the house so many times, he wonders if he would've made it there at all.

The tires crunch on gravel and Bruce nearly runs out of the car, coming to a stop beside Martha, who's standing at the foot of the front porch, shifting her hands around from her sides to her mouth to her hair and back.

Bruce wraps her into a hug, feels the way her hands tighten into fists in the back of his shirt.

“Are you sure?” he asks, quiet, and feels Martha nod into his shoulder.

“I know it,” she says, voice shaking like an earthquake. “My baby's come back to me.”

Bruce steps back but keeps his hands around her arms as she smiles through her tears.

“Where…” he starts, but immediately bites his tongue. He doesn't deserve –

“In the field,” she says. “He came up to the house just after ten this morning, gave me a heart attack.” Bruce can tells she's been crying on and off since then. “He went to stand in the sun after that,” she says. “Hasn't come back in since.”

Bruce turns around, then, and looks out into the cornfield beside the house. He thinks he can see a figure standing in the stalks, face tilted up to the sky, and he takes one step forward, and then another, until he's standing in the space between the house and the field, and Clark is suddenly there, too.

Bruce stares at him, at the plaid hanging off his shoulders, the torn jeans. His hair is all wild curls, and without his glasses his eyes are piercing, powerful things. Bruce knows he's been looking for too long, but he can't bring himself to look away. It's like looking at the setting sun, he thinks, transfixed. He's beautiful.

Clark takes a step forward. “Bruce, right?” he says, voice sounding almost sleep-rough, and Bruce resists the urge to clear his throat, to run his hands through Clark's hair.

“That's me,” he manages, sounding strained. Clark tilts his head, eyes flicking from Bruce to his mother and back again.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” Clark says, and _god_ Bruce is embarrassingly, guiltily, entirely mesmerized by him. Clark takes another step forward, offering Bruce his hand.

“I'm Clark,” he says, and then he smiles, and it's like the sun, too bright and too inviting, and Bruce feels like his world shifts a little. “Nice to meet you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what to say about this except I have been drowning in superbat feels and this is the first thing I've been able to get out and it's 100% an accident and entirely inspired by the wolves and the ravens by rogue valley so...?? tada


End file.
